Ernst Wilhelm Nay - Dominant Grün - image-1

Lot 248 D

Ernst Wilhelm Nay - Dominant Grün

Auction 1121 - overview Cologne
30.11.2018, 17:00 - Modern Art
Estimate: 230.000 € - 260.000 €
Result: 297.600 € (incl. premium)

Ernst Wilhelm Nay

Dominant Grün
1955

Oil on canvas 100.5 x 160 cm Framed. Signed and dated 'Nay. 55' in black lower right and signed, dated and titled 'Nay - "Dominant Grün" - 1955' verso on stretcher. - In fine condition.

The series of so-called “Scheibenbilder” was begun in 1954, following that of the “Rhythmische Bilder”, and was continued until 1962. With this series the artist staged colour and form in terms of a “process of the picture”, a recent and very decisive change in his painting. “Only in 1953 did I become entirely systematic and attempted”, says Nay, “to use the discs to develop a theory of painting as a foundation for art. [...] I conceived my own principle and searched it from all sides, with high hopes regarding an opening that would either have to come, or the whole thing would be for nothing [...].” (Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Lesebuch: Selbstzeugnisse und Schriften 1931-1968, Cologne 2002, p. 207).
Nay's approach of formal clarification accompanied his painting from the very beginning and safeguarded his continually intensified idea of the painting's autonomy and independence. Through the strict tonic chords of its colours, the chromatic and formal canon which he invented seems as though it were borrowed from a cosmos in which free-floating colours and forms - disconnected from material objectivity and emancipated from objective nature - move like tones in music, in thoughts and feelings.
Looked at in this way, what is occurring visually in this disc painting is very dynamic - with the dominant fields of green over the only faintly suggested, extensive, ovoid underlying forms and the red circular elements floating like satellites in space and set in contrast to a few blue islands. In balanced tranquillity, the tonal quality of the colliding colours achieves harmony and a simultaneous dissonance, like charged elementary particles which, based on their coolness or warmth, based on the tone and beauty of their chromatic qualities, evoke a feeling of perfect equilibrium. Trusting in the magical power of the colours, the artist renounces any attempt to rigorously clarify this cheerful interplay, to force an order (so to speak) upon the elements; only the rows of black dots finally intervene in a systematising way, like links in the pictorial space. Here Nay has utilised the floating chromatic phenomena in a dynamic colour choreography that develops a very open, almost transparent harmony in the interaction of colour (form), tonal quality (movement) and feeling (temperament).

Catalogue Raisonné

Scheibler 758

Provenance

Galerie Neher, Essen; Hannover Rückversicherungs AG, Hanover; Private collection, North Germany

Exhibitions

Munich 1955 (Galerie Günther Franke), Ernst Wilhelm Nay - Die Bilder von 1955 - Frühe Bilder 1938/39, cat. no. 16; Essen 1982 (Galerie Neher), Blickpunkte, cat. no. 30 with illus pp. 26/27; Essen 1989 (Galerie Neher), Moderne mit Tradition, cat. no. IX/5 with colour illus. p. 71 and 79